The Swiss department of UBS bank has informed the World Chess Federation that it will close its bank account, in April at the latest, due to FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov's presence on the sanctions list of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
"We face this problem, no doubt," FIDE Treasurer Adrian Siegel told Chess.com.
On February 12, an alarming letter by Siegel was posted on FIDE.com, where he speaks of a "serious problem." Siegel notes that Ilyumzhinov's name is still on the sanctions...

What do GMs Avital Boruchovsky, Yaroslav Zherebukh, Oleksandr Bortnyk, and Alexey Dreev have in common? They all scored 4/4 in round six of the PRO Chess League and led their teams to victory.
Both Boruchovsky and Bortnyk, by virtue of the fact that this was their first week competing, are also undefeated. They are the only two undefeated players in the league. In fact, each also picked up game of the week nominations below for their inspired play.
Cast your vote in the game and move of the...

The Chess.com member Kurniadigautama said:
“I am currently trying to improve my understanding of positional play. The engine told Black to castle kingside while White is threatening to double take on c6. If White does take after Black castles, how would you know that White is in trouble? Of course, I looked at some of the lines where White will be in trouble after taking. But all the lines are too long to calculate. Is there a simpler way to evaluate the position and tell that White is in...

Magnus Carlsen is the new unofficial Fischer Random world champion after beating Hikaru Nakamura 14-10 today in their match in Norway.
Taking into account the positive reception of the NRK TV show over the last five days, and the viewer numbers of the Chess.com live broadcast (similar to the last five days of Wijk aan Zee), the first serious Fischer Random event since 2009 can be considered a big success. Almost without exception, Carlsen and Nakamura played highly interesting games...

There are many things for which you can "hope" when playing chess: for example, you can hope that your opponent doesn't see that your move was a blunder and fails to exploit it; you can hope that your opponent doesn't see your threat and will let you execute it next move, or you can hope that your opponent will make a mistake and give you an advantage.
But when I first wrote about "Hope Chess" about 20 years ago, I meant none of those ideas. I specifically meant "consistently making moves without...

After a dramatic day at the Fischer random (chess960) world championship match Magnus Carlsen still leads by two points. He started with a convincing win vs Hikaru Nakamura but then lost Monday's second game, trying to win a RB-vs-R endgame until his time ran out.
Carlsen left fans and commentators in shock as he let his clock run down to zero in a position where he could have claimed a draw at any moment. Chief arbiter Hans Olav Lahlum told Chess.com that he would have declared the game drawn...

Curling, one of the 15 sports of the 2018 winter Olympics, is in the spotlight this week as millions of viewers worldwide tune in to watch the icy game of strategy and dexterity.
Curling has been called "chess on ice," and the comparison is a good one. There are many fun similarities between our game of chess and curling, and once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere.
So why is curling chess on ice?
Here are nine ways curling is like chess.
U.S. Olympic curler Cory Christensen....